Organizations are increasing employing very large database systems, such as multi-tenant systems, in connection with their enterprise operations. In many contexts it is often desirable to partition all or a portion of such databases into a second or “sandbox” database for testing and maintenance purposes and to provide a relatively small database maintenance window.
Prior art methods for copying data in the context of application change management typically involve making copies of the entire database, which in a multitenant system requires copying an organization's entire table data row by row without any opportunity to partition data between that which should be copied and that which should not. As a result, the selected data is often unnecessarily large. Maintaining the capacity to store the copied data can result in an enormous cost to the enterprise. Furthermore, the fact that so much data is being copied means that the user will typically be required to wait a long time for the copy to complete, and the time window for doing the copy is large enough that significant inconsistencies may be introduced into the data.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods for managing and partitioning data in a manner that is fast, easily manageable, high data-availability for critical data.